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Interactive Fiction 1
Introduction (still editting, just needed to put everyones work in for now!) Interactive fiction is a genre that uses elements of a video game and text in order to create a story. The story is narrated by the reader through different textual responses and commands, which dictates the outcome of events. Time only passes when a command is entered, and in many cases you can use the commands ABOUT, INFO, or HELP to get more information about the specific game. http://ifcomp.org/comp05/if.html Unlike other computer games, Magnus Olsson explains how interactive fiction uses text adventures which utilizes places, characters, events, emotions, and people in a way that brings meaning into this genre of literature.http://www.df.lth.se/~mol/if.html.There are obstacles and puzzles throughout the text that are meant for the reader to overcome, which brings the story to life and creates a non-linear experience. experience.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction (Aviry) Around 1975, Will Crowther was working at a company called Bolt Beranek Newman (BBN) where he created a textual simulation of a cave he had been to and explored. This idea was picked up by Don Woods at the Stanford University and expanded into what became a popular computer game called “Adventure” or “Colossal Cave”. Since the creation of Adventure, people have developed interactive fiction in different ways. For example, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, four students created the game called “Zork”, a technological advancement that brought in the first interesting character. Early players of interactive fictions would not use the more lavish video machines because they were difficult to find in the late 1970s. They would use Teletype or other print machines to experience interactive fiction as ink on paper. Infocom and many other companies in the late 1970s and 1980s produced interactive fiction as the dominant form of entertainment software for the computer.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction#History http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d4Fu90ubmA (Brian) One of the major features of interactive fiction that sets it apart from other electronic media is its unique writing style or language. For any action to happen in the game there needs to be input provided by the player and this input is usually in the form of short sentences. For example in the early forms of interactive fiction, instead of typing “I want to open the mailbox and read the letter” the player would have to type “open mailbox”, then “take letter” and finally “read the letter, this new language focuses more on verbs and nouns more so than any other words in a syntax. Later forms allowed players to combine commands such as “Take the egg and go north”. Because the game responds to the players in full sentences, this unique language only applies to the commands that the players input. (Heather) Another major feature of interactive fiction is the output from the text, which, unlike a normal story, changes based on the players input. In interactive fiction, the reader can lead the story to have a different outcome or outcomes every time they play. A good example of this is found in the game Zork when the the player comes up to a tree that has an egg in it, the player can either leave the egg alone, pick it up, or drop the egg, each action will cause a diferent outcome for the game. Remembering the details of each outcome is essential because there may be subtle hints that can come in handy later and the reader may not be able to go back and read them. Authors typically create a destined path that is the more standard direction to play the game with subtle hints, however, there may be a lot more to uncover when the player explores outside of those parameters.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction (Eric) A subtle, but highly important feature of interactive fiction is its ability to make the "first person perspective" more believable. In non-interactive fiction first-person narratives, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground or Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_narrative, the reader is only such, and as a result they are unable to 'believe'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief that he or she is the character about whom the tale is written. Instead, they are inclined to believe that they are sitting by the character, hearing them recount their tale or that they are reading the memoirs of the character. On the other hand, a first-person work of interactive fiction allows the reader this commodity, especially in modern works such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyrim Skyrim] http://elit.umwblogs.org/2012/03/30/skyrim-is-it-interactive-fiction/ or a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabletop_role-playing_game tabletop RPG], where the reader/player not only experiences the world through the eyes of the character that they are playing, but also decides what actions the character will take. It is this level of control that allows the reader/player to believe for a short time, if he or she so decides, that they are the character. (Kyle) Group Members Jordan Hampton Brian Yu Heather Patterson Aviry Reich Eric Sasso Kyle Baird Anchorhead (Jordan Hampton) (Editor) Suspended (Brian Yu) Written by Michael Berlyn in 1983, Suspended is the sixth an interactive fiction video game published by Infocom. Similar to most Infocom interactive fiction video games, it was available on the more popular personal computers during that time, such as the Apple II, PC, Atari ST and Commodore 64. Suspended is created with a novel’s approach in the way it was made. The characters spend the entire time in a state of suspended animation rather than being free to move about and interact with the world inside the game directly. They can only interact by controlling the actions of a number of robot surrogates. The player's character has been surrounded within a facility that controls vital systems, like weather and transit controls, for an Earth-settled planet called Contra. The character was supposed to sleep in a cryogenic suspension for the next 500 years, 20 miles beneath the surface of the planet, while the great Filtering Computers maintained all surface control systems. However, as the game opens, the character is awakened by a series of error messages. The facility has suffered disastrous damage from an earthquake, which has made the Filtering Computers severely unstable. Since then, the weather has become dangerously out of control, the food production has suffered, and the transportation system is continuously malfunctioning. This is beginning to cause many unparalleled accidents and causalities. The player has six robots to use fix this catastrophe. They must operate the robots strategically to bring the Filtering Computers back to normal. Each robot has a different insight of the world and offers the player specific abilities. Iris is the only robot with visual sensors, which can provide descriptions of locations and objects. Whiz is the most technical robot, which is used mainly for accessing a central library computer for information. Waldo has the most physical capabilities, which allows him to grab and hold objects. Auda is armed with sensitive audio receptors, which can provide the sounds and vibrations. Poet is a diagnostic robot that can sense a flow of electricity. Lastly, Sensa has the ability to detect magnetic and photon emissions. The player's mission is to repair the damages from the earthquake and restore the control systems to normal conditions before a group of group of people arrives at the facility to "disconnect" his mind, ultimately to be replaced by a clone and the player’s death. Like many of the other interactive fiction titles, Suspended is both a sense of “reading” and “playing”. This game incorporates fiction in works of video gaming by providing a story or adventure where the player must interact with the fiction to complete it to find out what happens. Suspended is one of the harder interactive fiction games to play, as you need to focus on each robot and their abilities. In addition, this is similar to a novel because a person would need to understand the characters of the book so that he or she will not get lost. There is only one way to complete the mission in Suspended, like there is only one way to finish a novel. In comparison to other interactive fiction games like Zork, Suspended is far more difficult because there are more specific tasks that each robot must complete in order to restore order in the world. In Zork, the player controls one person and guides him on a journey to find treasure in which he can get lost or defeated. However, in Suspended, the player must take control of 6 different robots where they each have a limited ability and can only complete a certain task because they can do anything else. In the end, playing this interactive video game was difficult at first. You really need to know each robot’s special ability. However, I would not have been able to continue playing without a walkthrough.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/suspended.html http://tinyurl.com/7tjdoo6 http://www.bruceasmith.com/Infocom/Suspended.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0piVnRop8s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Heather Patterson) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an interactive fiction video game that is based on the sci-fi comedy novels of the same name written by Douglas Adams. The game is full of inside jokes and references that are only obvious to someone who is familiar with the original material. The game uses a few of the plo t lines from the series, starting with the introduction of Arthur Dents character and the destruction of Earth by aliens to make way for an intergalactic super highway. What is notable about this video game is that the author of the series of novels was also involved in this remediation. The game was designed in 1984 by Steve Meretzky and released through the software company Infocom. Douglas developed the ideas and program, while Steve Meretzky did the coding. It was one of the company’s first games and sold 350,000 copies. http://h2g2.com/A943184 The game that I played was The Hitchhikers Adventure Game the 20th Anniversary Edition on BBC’s website. The game it’s self takes up only a small portion of the page on the website. In the upper left-hand corner there is a key that states “you are here” and in the beginning of the game the player is currently on earth. Underneath the key there is a direction key that lets the character move north, south, east, west and everything in between. In the middle of the screen there is a window of sorts that shows the room that the character is in.The picture of the room is simply drawn with little detail and it is black and blue colored. To the right of the window there is a compass, a circle that tells you how many moves you have made and a circle that contains the score. To the right of this there is an area that shows what you have acquired so far in the game. In the middle and bottom portion of the game there is the guide, which is where you put your commands and underneath this is where the commands and instructions from the game shows up. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_nolan.shtml The writing style of this game follows the traditional writing style of interactive fiction. The player still has to input commands that are in short sentences such as “turn on the light”. Although the game that I am playing is fairly new I am still not allowed to combine two or more commands into one sentence. For example I wrote “stand up and take the robe” the response I received from the game is “You used the word "take" in a way that I don't understand”. The response from the game is always in full sentences and often humorous in nature. The game also seems to follow the first person narrative feature of interactive fiction. The player assumes the roles of some of the main characters starting with Arthur Dent. It should be noted however that it may be confusing for the novice player to determine which character they are playing but the player can input “who am I?” and the game will inform the player. Some of the commands that the player inputs are shown on the screen such as in the beginning the screen is black and after the player inputs “turn on the lights” the room is illuminated. These graphics allow the player to visualize better what is happening and therefore they are more able to believe that they are the character. From what I was able to get through it seems that there is an overall plot that the game follows in the beginning which is the player has to meet up with Ford Prefect, and leave earth before its destruction. It did not appear that there were any other pathways or story-lines in this game. A large portion of the game is spent reacting to certain stimuli such as the bulldozer threatening to tear down Arthur Dents house and Ford Prefect discussing that the earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes. So Far (Aviry Reich) Interactive fiction is a genre that uses elements of a video game and text in order to create a story. The story is narrated by the reader through different textual responses and commands, which dictates the outcome of events. Time only passes when a command is entered, and in many cases you can use the commands ABOUT, INFO, or HELP to get more information about the specific game. http://ifcomp.org/comp05/if.html Unlike other computer games, Magnus Olsson explains how interactive fiction uses text adventures which utilizes places, characters, events, emotions, and people in a way that brings meaning into this genre of literature.http://www.df.lth.se/~mol/if.html.There are obstacles and puzzles throughout the text that are meant for the reader to overcome, which brings the story to life and creates a non-linear experience. experience.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction (Aviry) Eric Sasso Another major feature of interactive fiction is the output from the text, which, unlike a normal story, changes based on the players input. In interactive fiction, the reader can lead the story to have a different outcome or outcomes every time they play. A good example of this is found in the game Zork when the the player comes up to a tree that has an egg in it, the player can either leave the egg alone, pick it up, or drop the egg, each action will cause a diferent outcome for the game. Remembering the details of each outcome is essential because there may be subtle hints that can come in handy later and the reader may not be able to go back and read them. Authors typically create a destined path that is the more standard direction to play the game with subtle hints, however, there may be a lot more to uncover when the player explores outside of those parameters.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction Lost Pig (Kyle Baird) A subtle, but highly important feature of interactive fiction is its ability to make the "first person perspective" more believable. In non-interactive fiction first-person narratives, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground or Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_narrative, the reader is only such, and as a result they are unable to 'believe'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief that he or she is the character about whom the tale is written. Instead, they are inclined to believe that they are sitting by the character, hearing them recount their tale or that they are reading the memoirs of the character. On the other hand, a first-person work of interactive fiction allows the reader this commodity, especially in modern works such as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyrim Skyrim] http://elit.umwblogs.org/2012/03/30/skyrim-is-it-interactive-fiction/ or a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabletop_role-playing_game tabletop RPG], where the reader/player not only experiences the world through the eyes of the character that they are playing, but also decides what actions the character will take. It is this level of control that allows the reader/player to believe for a short time, if he or she so decides, that they are the character. References